Go to Perfect Day’s website and you’re greeted with a friendly, baby’s room blue background, and the message: “Milk Reinvented: Sustainable. Kind. Delicious.” Scroll down and you’ll find a user-friendly description of Perfect Day’s “process,” complete with animation and links to learn even more. Then, an overview of why Perfect Day is more sustainable than traditional dairy products (e.g. 65% less energy consumption, 84% less greenhouse gas emissions and 98% less water consumption than traditional dairy). Perfect Day's mission—“to empower you to enjoy the dairy foods you love while making the world a kinder, greener place”— is about as antithetical to pushback against GMO labeling as you can get. In short, Perfect Day is not hiding anything. And, they’re motivated by similar concerns around the environment and sustainability as many others their age.

“This idea of making meat that's better for the planet, better for people, better for animals just captivated me and that's why I'm here doing this work,” says Perumal Gandhi, Ryan’s partner and co-conspirator, who has his masters in tissue engineering. Years ago, Perumal became concerned about the environmental impact of animal products, and “went vegan.” Soon, "I just missed cheese and yogurt and ice cream and all the different dairy products that I grew up with,” he reports. Now, Perfect Day is focused on “making the best animal-free dairy products you've ever had.”

Perfect Day bottle rendering, courtesy of Perfect Day

How are they doing it?

Organisms, Perumal and Ryan explain to me, follow a blueprint to construct every little piece of their bodies—whether that’s bacteria, plants or animals. That blueprint is DNA. “What's really cool about DNA is that it's a language that every single organism speaks,” says Ryan, with excitement. “It's not different for a cat or a walnut.” That means that once you have the blueprint for something—like casine, the milk protein—the DNA can be read and executed just as well by yeast as a cow.

"You put that gene into yeast and for all intents and purposes it's now behaving like a cow in that one way that matters to us.” It makes milk.